The NewsCloud Blog

Introducing NewsCloud Community Scoring and Member Levels

From the beginning, a primary goal of building the NewsCloud community has been to empower it with influence over the way the site itself operates. Today, I'm introducing an experimental scoring system which rewards more active NewsCloud users with more influence in our community.

Initially, I've programmed NewsCloud to rank members based on their levels of participation as well as performance as judged by other members (through responses to posted stories and comments). From these rankings, NewsCloud assigns each member a user level e.g. Platinum (high), Gold, Silver, Bronze, Contributor and Reader (beginner). The higher your user level, the more voting power you have to determine which stories appear on the front page at NewsCloud. Rankings will be re-calculated regularly. If your participation increases, expect to see your user level grow over time. By visiting your account page, you can see a complete breakdown of the factors we're measuring and how you rank against the overall community.

The ranking system not only rewards you for voting and posting stories and comments but it also rewards you when stories you post generate discussions or when other readers rate your comments highly. The rankings also reward you for inviting new members to our community - especially so when they join. It also assesses your involvement over the past 30 days as well as the past six months.

I will continue to experiment and tweak the measurement system over time to produce better and better results. If you have questions or feedback, please email me at jeff@newscloud.com. Please also let me know if you encounter any problems with the new rankings or experience problems voting.

Thank you for your continued support!

You can view your account score here. Here is an example breakdown below:

Technorati Tags: member levels, user scoring, ranking

November is Feature Request Month at NewsCloud

If you have a favorite feature idea or feature request, post it to the comments here and we'll try to prioritize adding the most popular and interesting by the end of the month. Thanks for your continued support!

If you want to share your idea privately, you can email it to me.

Technorati Tags: feature requests, november, wish lists

NewsCloud's Facebook Application Featured on ReadWriteWeb

Josh mentioned NewsCloud's Facebook applications as one of the top 10 applications on Facebook for utility.

Our list today will look at the top 10 apps for utility. These are apps that are in some way useful. This was a pretty broad list, and probably took us the longest to cut down to a top ten. As a result, we were unfortunately forced to leave off a lot of good apps. This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments.

NewsCloud is a social news application for Facebook. The NewsCloud app lets you submit, read, comment, and vote on stories from within your Facebook account. It also supports videos from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. NewsCloud users can form and join "clouds" (groups) that focus on a specific topic of news, and can access Facebook's built in share utility to easily share stories with their friends.

Install the NewsCloud Application at Facebook

Try our other applications:

Install the Comedy Central Videos Application on Facebook
install the Daily Show News Application on Facebook

Technorati Tags: facebook, readwriteweb

Help beta test the NewsCloud Facebook Application

Help us beta test the Facebook application for NewsCloud:

Our Facebook application allows you to keep up with top stories, breaking news, track what your friends are reading as well as watch video from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Not only can you watch your favorite video clips from Facebook, but you can share them and post them to your friends on Facebook.

The application is in beta testing - but works pretty well. If you need to report a bug, request a feature or high five us, email me.

I want it now: Install the NewsCloud application on my Facebook profile

Technorati Tags: colbert report clips, daily show on facebook, facebook, facebook applications, share daily show clips, the daily show

Social Signal Offers to Support NewsCloud Outreach

Social Signal announced today its offer to work with NewsCloud expanding our outreach efforts with NGOs:

That's why we've decided to extend the same offer of pro bono support to one of the projects that isn't in the room today. Next month, we'll start working with Newscloud, an open source media platform that combines news sharing and social networking. ...

Using Newscloud, an organization's members and supporters can identify the news stories that matter to them, annotate those stories with their own reflections, and collaboratively create a window on the day's issues that reflect their interests and priorities. Individual users may find Newscloud compelling too -- quite apart from the social benefits of collaboratively surfacing interesting stories, it's got a great interface for reading blogs and news sites that displays stories as they appear on the originating site, rather than as plain or reformatted text. The best way to understand Newscloud's value is to visit the Newscloud site, sign up for an account (it's very quick!) and take it for a spin yourself. ...

We're going to work with Jeff to make it easier for non-profits to integrate Newscloud's features directly into their own web sites. Working from our own experience developing non-profit sites on the Drupal platform, we're going to help Jeff develop a Newscloud Drupal module, so that the thousands of community sites now running Drupal can integrate Newscloud-enabled news sharing directly into their sites.

I'm very appreciative of Alexandra's generous offer to work with us on this effort.

if you're a developer and want to learn more about NewsCloud, check out the NewsCloud Wiki or our NewsCloud Web Services API documentation.

Technorati Tags: drupal, newscloud, social signal

NetSquared Tuesday Launches in Seattle June 5, 2007

We're co-organizing the first NetSquared event in Seattle next Tuesday for social software and nonprofit types to meet, socialize and brainstorm on what future community meetings might look like.

My colleague Sarah Schacht of Knowledge As Power and I are co-organizing the kickoff of Seattle's first Net2 Tuesday. NetSquared is a Tech Soup venture to increase the adoption of Web 2.0 services by nonprofit organizations and others interested in creating a social benefit. The goal of NetTuesday is to create an ongoing peer-driven community event for the development of social software and real world applications in Seattle.

This is the first Net2 Tuesday in Seattle, so we're focusing the time mostly to talk to each other about what we'd like to get out of events like this. Please email your friends about this event. Everyone is welcome.

When: Tuesday, June 5th
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Where: The McLeod Residence, 2209 2nd Ave, Seattle, WA 98121 (2nd floor).
Recurring: First Tuesdays of each month, exact details to be determined

Read more

Technorati Tags: net tuesdays, net2, seattle

Knight News Challenge Winners Announced; MIT Tops List With $5 Million

Editor and Publisher reports the MIT Media Lab received a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation "to create a Center for Future Civic Media to develop, test, and study new forms of high-tech community news." Other winners included $700k to MTV for mobile youth journalists to cover the 2008 election. ChicagoCrime received $1.1M "to create a series of city-specific Web sites devoted to public records and hyper-local information" and VillageSoup received $885K "to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation." E & P also reports "Eleven other grants of between $25,000 and $340,000 were awarded...[and]...nine bloggers will each get $15,000 to blog about topics ranging from GPS tracking devices to 'out-of-the-box' community publishing solutions." Congrats to all the winners!

For the rest of us, there's always next year. Entries start up for 2007 July 1st, but are more narrowly focused than last year:

Anybody, anywhere in the world is eligible for funding — if the project meets all of the following criteria:

1. Use digital media.
2. Involve new forms of news in the public interest.
3. Focus on specific geographic community.

NewsCloud entered its open source platform in 2006. Although we were asked to submit a secondary application, we were not selected as a winner.

Technorati Tags: knight foundation, news challenge, knight foundation winners

Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments

Via Kathy:

Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged. Build your own online social capital and become a great blog commenter by keeping these simple guidelines in mind before you post.

Stay on topic.

Bloggers enable comments on specific blog posts to hear more about the content of the post. Don't change the subject. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a comment on a post about Hurricane Katrina that reads, "By the way, do you know anything about turtles?"

Contribute new information to the discussion.

Twelve people saying the same exact thing in one comment thread is useless and irritating. Before you comment, read the entire thread and make sure your comment offers something new to the conversation. If you don't have the time or patience to read an entire thread, then don't comment at all. The longer a comment thread the more likely someone has already said what you're thinking, and the less likely it is to be read by future visitors anyway.

Don't comment for the sake of commenting.

Commenters who only say "First!" or "Nice site" on an open thread have no business hitting that "Post" button at all. Further, only spammers comment for the sake of adding their name and URL to a web page. Useless comments will gain you the reputation for being a useless commenter.

Read the rest of Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments

Technorati Tags: comments, guide to weblog comments, lifehacker

Congratulations to the NetSquared Project Winners!

Here are the 21 projects that will be going to this year's Netsquared conference. Thanks for voting for NewsCloud, unfortunately, we did not make the cut.

Technorati Tags: netsquared, netsquared winners, newscloud

NewsCloud Founder Jeff Reifman Interviewed by Business Networking Advice

Josh Hinds of Business Networking Advice posted this brief online interview with me.

Technorati Tags: business networking advice, newscloud, jeff reifman

Digg Team vs. the NewsCloud team

Note: I think Digg has added more people since this photo was taken. Also, there have been interns and contractors involved at different times in NewsCloud.

Working alone has both helped NewsCloud but also hurt it in some ways (not enough benefits from collaboration). However, it took some time to experiment with NewsCloud and get the formula right, I think the approach of starting up alone on a tight budget has been right. One person startups are a bit of a dying breed and NewsCloud will probably have to grow soon too.

Technorati Tags: david vs. goliath, digg team, digg team photo, jeff reifman, kevin rose, newscloud, startups, team photos

The three things I don't like about Newsvine

Newsvine is another local Seattle social news startup. They have six employees and about $1.25 million in funding. They are different than NewsCloud in that they focus a lot on original material whereas NewsCloud is more of an aggregator using citizens as editors.

The three things I don't like about Newsvine are:

1) The big green monster at the top of every page. I find it big, dark and confusing...

2) As they license the Associated Press feed, they seed much of their site with only AP content. Readers can submit from other sources but I find the primary content very mainstream. Check out the NewsCloud Newswire for a more diversified approach.

3) They lock readers into their blogging service. Newsvine authors are essentially bloggers who only blog about newsy material and only on Newsvine. With such great blog tools such as WordPress (free), Blogger (free) and TypePad out there, why lock their members into a proprietary tool. Blogging is meant to be more than just news. I just find the idea of Newsvine's proprietary blogging service very restrictive. Btw, NewsCloud's approach is to allow readers to blog stories to almost any third party service - our approach is open.

Technorati Tags: newsvine, seattle, newscloud, things I don't like

Time to vote for your favorite Netsquared Projects

I've nominated NewsCloud for a Netsquared innovation award. The grants will be small but beneficial for networking and expanding awareness for NewsCloud. I'll use any award to make our open source platform easier to install and extend so that more organizations can benefit from the site's capabilities.

Please register at Netsquared and review the project list. You must vote for five (minimum) to ten (maximum) projects. As NewsCloud is completely self-funded, I'd appreciate if you consider voting for NewsCloud as one of your picks. You must complete your ballot by Saturday, April 14th at 12 noon PDT.

1. Register to vote here

2. Review the project proposals online or download them in PDF form

3. Cast your ballot for your favorite five to ten projects. You must choose at least five or your ballot will not be counted. Voting twice for the same project will disqualify your ballot.

Here are Netsquared recommended voting guidelines:

We seek to present featured projects that can demonstrate the following attributes (though we understand that different projects will have different emphases and strengths). We ask you to keep these criteria in mind to choose projects that:

• Use the power of community and social networks to create change
• Use existing, or newly developed social web technology tools for social impact
• Have a plausible financial model
• Have a clear way to measure success
• Exhibit extraordinary leadership, passion and resourcefulness
• Exhibit a passion for social change

Here is NewsCloud's project proposal:

NewsCloud is an open source platform that reduces barriers for community groups integrating news-based social networks into their existing Web sites. NewsCloud seeks funds to make its platform as easy to install and extend as Wikimedia, Drupal, et al

Two other projects that caught my eye are my colleague's Aspiration's Social Source Commons (Aspiration funded my earlier project ActionStudio) and The Martus Project - Secure Information Project for global human rights workers. Please check them out.

Thanks for taking the time to do this. I realize it's a bit time consuming, but hopefully you'll find out about some interesting projects that you didn't know about.

Technorati Tags: netsquared, newscloud

NewsCloud's Remote Offices on Google MyMaps

If you're looking for one of NewsCloud's remote offices, you can find us on Google's MyMaps.

Technorati Tags: remote offices, mymaps, google , newscloud

The Web of Dan Gillmor, the most powerful man in citizen journalism

If you're wondering which citizen journalism and media projects Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, is involved in, here is a list of the disclosures on Center for Citizen Media site.

Dan’s current disclosures:

* Member, U.S. advisory board, FON, a collaborative Wi-Fi company.
* Member, advisory board, NowPublic, a new-media company.
* Investor, Wikia, a consumer Wiki company (Jimmy Wales, founder, is a member of the Center for Citizen Media Board of Advisors).
* Investor, Enthusiast Group, a new media company (Steve Outing, founder, is a member of the Center for Citizen Media Board of Advisors).
* Dan’s previous enterprise, Bayosphere, has been sold to Backfence.com, and Dan has a continuing relationship (including financial) with the new owner.
* Dan holds a small number of shares in these media companies: McClatchy Co., the New York Times Co. and Dow Jones Inc.

Dan is also a member of the board of directors of the California First Amendment Coalition.

I had thought Dan was also involved in Daylife but don't see a citation for this, so I am probably wrong.

I would also expect that Dan is involved in the judging for the Knight Foundation News Challenge but have no information on this either.

If anyone has updated information or links, please post them here.

Technorati Tags: center for citizen media, dan gillmor, gillmor, we the media

Please review NewsCloud's NetSquared Project Nomination

If you haven't yet, please read and post feedback to our NetSquared Project Nomination:

Expanding access to the NewsCloud Open Source Media Platform

Technorati Tags: netsquared, newscloud, open source platforms

What should NewsCloud's standards for photos be?

Right now we have an image with frontal nudity on the cover of NewsCloud, it's an image from an HIV awareness campaign which is provoking debate in Europe about its appropriation of such content for a public health campaign. What do you think NewsCloud's policy for images should be? What about images of War and violence? Should there be a difference between images on the front page and images on story pages? Please post your comments below...

You can see the story in question here:
HIV Shock Campaign: Wimbledon Star's AIDS Prevention Campaign Provokes

Technorati Tags: policies, photos

NewsCloud for Organizations

I've written up an initial guide for organizations such as community groups and NGOs who wish to make use of NewsCloud. Basically, there are five levels of integration available:

Level One: Add NewsCloud headlines to your Web site or blog

Level Two: Create a Journal to clip headlines from around the Web for your Web site or blog

Level Three: Create a Group for multiple staff or member stakeholders to track and clip headlines on related topics for your blog or Web site

Level Four: Invite your stakeholders to participate in news gathering for your organization

Level Five: Host your own installation of the NewsCloud software at your own Web site

See Guide for Organizations on our Wiki for the full document.

Technorati Tags: guide for organizations, newscloud for organizations, newscloud for groups

Google AdSense API Should Support Growth of User Generated Content Communities

While you have to be a computer scientist to understand what Google is offering with its AdSense API, I think it will be a boon to user generated content communities like NewsCloud that decide to share revenue with contributors.

Essentially, the AdSense API lets a site like NewsCloud publish ads to pages that the contributor posts on our sites e.g. your NewsCloud journal or a specific NewsCloud story that you post. Then, Google manages the revenue share that NewsCloud as publisher chooses. It's all automated and fairly transparent.

So, for example, a NewsCloud contributor could be paid from 25 to 100 percent of the revenue generated from ads placed on the pages of the stories they contribute as well as their journal and group pages.

The Google API certainly provides an automated, robust solution for publishers to share revenue with contributors. I'm not sure if we'll adopt the model but I know that we'll consider it strongly. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Technorati Tags: advertising, google adsense, adsense api, newscloud, user generated content

NewsCloud Called Digg for Grown Ups

A friend forwarded a second hand review of NewsCloud which summarized it as, "NewsCloud looks like a Digg for grown ups." Funny.

Of course, NewsCloud is also open source and offers an extensive API whereas Digg does not. Also, Digg has about twenty full time employees and we have one unpaid staffer.

Technorati Tags: digg, newscloud

Crosscut to launch April 2nd

Crosscut, a news aggregator for the Pacific Northwest region, launches April 2nd. It's technology is partly inspired by NewsCloud.

Disclaimer, the founder of NewsCloud is a minority investor in Crosscut.

Technorati Tags: crosscut, seattle, newscloud

Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement

Craig Newmark helped fund a new report by the Center for Citizen Media. It's called Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement:

In this report, we look at the first generation of traditional-media innovators in community engagement online. We’ll be talking about what worked, and what didn’t, in this early round of experimentation. If you’re interested in the movement towards “crowdsourcing,” “citizen journalism,” or “user generated content” by traditional media organizations such as newspapers and television news programs, you'll find information about some of the major efforts underway today.

You can download a printable version of the full report (PDF, 3.2 MB).

Technorati Tags: frontiers of innovation, community engagement, citizen media, crowdsourcing, citizen journalism

This Week's Spotlight Blogger is Jeanne Sather of the Assertive Cancer Patient

Jeanne Sather of the Assertive Cancer Patient blog is this week's Spotlight blogger. Today, she talks about while the media reports one price for prescription drugs for cancer, patients are actually paying a much higher retail price:

I’ve been bugged by press reports, in USA Today and elsewhere, that say Herceptin, a targeted antibody used to treat breast cancer, costs $3,000 a month. That’s not what I pay. (Or not what my insurance company pays, anyway.) Herceptin costs my insurance company $78,812 a year. Why? Read on.

Technorati Tags: jeanne sather, assertive cancer patient, cancer blogs

Justin Cole of Media Matters is This Week's Spotlight Blogger

Justin is the Online Outreach Coordinator of Media Matters for America. His first post this week is about Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot and how the media is covering or not covering it. Read the story and join the conversation.

Technorati Tags: media matters, justin cole, ann coulter, john edwards

Digital Media Professor Kathy Gill is this week's Spotlight blogger

Welcome to Kathy Gill, a professor in the University of Washington Digital Media department. Kathy will be picking stories for this week's spotlight. Kathy blogs about politics at About.com and is also the author of the Wired Pen blog.

Kathy's first feature today is U.S. Funds Being Secretly Funneled To Middle East Terrorists?, Sy Hersh's latest expose on the Bush administration's misadventures in the middle east.

Technorati Tags: kathy gill, university of washington , digital media, wired pen

Cecile Andrews is This Week's Spotlight Blogger

Welcome to Cecile Andrews who is this week's spotlight blogger. Cecile is the author of The Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life and Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre and founder of the Phinney Ecovillage in north Seattle, also a community educator who does frequent talks and appearances throughout the West Coast.

After interviewing her for Investing for Change, I decided to pay off my mortgage rather than stay leveraged in debt to invest more heavily in the stock market.

Technorati Tags: cecile andrews, slow is beautiful

iCommunity.TV beta - Mash up of YouTube and Geomapping

As I've mentioned before, we try to promote interesting new journalism efforts here ... we know how hard it is to get the word out about great new sites. I received this note from Chris at eParticipation about his new site:

iCommunity.TV is a collaborative broadcast network for local news, built with the intention to promote video as a media for citizen reporting. As an aggregation platform iCommunity.TV ties into the popular video-sharing service Youtube.com, extends its offering by letting a broad audience georeference and sort video clips in news categories and offers multiple convenient ways to watch and subscribe to these custom channels (e.g. “Politics in Berlin, Germany”). iCommunity.TV is a service of eParticipation.com.

Technorati Tags: icommunity, eparticipation

DB Ferguson of NoFactZone is This Week's Spotlight Blogger

DB Ferguson, author of the Stephen Colbert fan blog: NoFactZone.net is this week's spotlight blogger. Welcome DB!

I'm happily married (4+ years), and live in a tragically hip loft in downtown Dallas. During my "day-job" I am a reporting analyst for a big foreign corporation. I have two fish, three cats, and a tarantula. I am also webmaster of a Stephen Colbert-centric news blog, NoFactZone.net.

My favorite headline from DB came when we announced this year's top topics of 2007. The Colbert Nation fan board had an active role in the voting ... Colbert won out by a large margin, over more serious topics that NewsCloud usually covers. DB wrote: "In your FACE, Darfur Crisis!"

Technorati Tags: db ferguson, stephen colbert, darfur crisis, no fact zone

NewsCloud on NPR All Things Considered

Yesterday, NewsCloud founder Jeff Reifman and friend Grace Stahre were featured on NPR's All Things Considered during a story on wealth and stock options.

While no one knows the exact number of Microsoft millionaires, Seattle economist Richard Conway has estimated that approximately 10,000 were created by the year 2000.

Jeff Reifman was one of them. When he left Microsoft in 1999, he had about $6 million worth of stock. He feels extremely fortunate to have been at the right place at the right time, but he says he was lucky long before that.

"I grew up in an upper-middle-class environment and was well-prepared to take advantage of opportunities I came across," he says. "The truth is, outcomes have a lot more to do with how lucky we are at the beginning than we care to admit."

Today, Reifman volunteers his time as a technology expert. Hoping to foster more independent voices in the media, he recently began a collaborative, news-networking site called Newscloud.

Back at Microsoft, Grace Stahre, who had been lured to the company with stock options, was watching her fortune fade.

"I felt like I kind of came in at the end of the ride," Stahre says.

Read more

If you'd like to read more about Jeff's writing on Microsoft and wealth, check out his articles from the Seattle Weekly.

Technorati Tags: jeff reifman, grace stahre, npr, microsoft

Marcus Courtney of WashTech is this week's Spotlight contributor

This week's NewsCloud Spotlight contributor is Marcus Courtney of WashTech:

WashTech/CWA is the nation's leading union for high-tech workers, ensuring that our voices get heard and our needs are met. Today, job security, health care, retirement plans, offshore outsourcing and visas are on our minds more than ever. From Silicon Valley to Boston, high-tech workers are joining our national network-to raise our voice and make a difference. Now it is time for you to join our movement.

I first interviewed Marcus for my Seattle Weekly article Citizen Microsoft to learn more about Microsoft's outsourcing, off-shoreing and lobbying against the interests of local technology workers.

If you know someone who would make a great NewsCloud Spotlight contributor, please email me.

Technorati Tags: spotlight, washtech, marcus courtney, labor unions

The Colbert Report tops NewsCloud's Top Topics for 2007

The results are in and Stephen Colbert and the Colbert Report were voted the top topics for 2007 by NewsCloud readers. Colbert might call it "NewsCloudLobbying" by the ColbertNation.

Here is the complete list of topics for 2007 that you picked for us to focus on. I've gone ahead and set up groups for each topic. Sign up at NewsCloud, join one of these groups and help add related blogs and links to these topics.

• Colbert Report
• Global Warming
• Iraq Occupation
• Darfur Crisis
• Electronic Voting Reform
• Afghanistan Security
• Corporate Welfare
• Decline of the Dollar
• 2008 Presidential Race
• U.S. Imperialism
• Net Neutrality
• Israel Palestine Conflict
• Nuclear Korea
• Veterans Funding
• Nintendo Wii

Technorati Tags: 2007, colbert report, groups, hot topics, stephen colbert, top topics

Meet David Roberts, this week's Spotlight blogger

We're starting a new feature at NewsCloud, it's a weekly Spotlight blogger who will bring expertise from their community to ours. To kick off our inaugural week, David Roberts of Grist Magazine will be posting a story each weekday for you to read and respond to.

Each day, Dave's Spotlight pick will appear in the upper left corner of our cover page.

Dave's Journal can be read here. His first story today is "Clusterfuck Nation" by Jim Kunstler.

By the 1980s, America had been converted, with monstrous efficiency, into what I have called a geography of nowhere, a panorama of identical highway strips, malls, big box warehouses, fried food out-parcels, and free parking wastelands -- all serving the endless new subdivision pods of single family houses. The ultimate result was a landscape full of places no longer worth caring about.

Read more or post your comments

If you're a Grist fan, you may remember that Dave famously reached the Rush Limbaugh program by suggesting that paid detractors of global warming should one day face a Nuremberg-like climate change trial court. It seems the radical right doesn't like it when progressives do a better job at using language.

If you'd like to suggest someone for the Spotlight feature, please email me. The person should have some kind of expertise but doesn't necessarily have to be a blogger.

Technorati Tags: david roberts, grist, kunstler, newscloud, spotlight

Overcoming hate speech and intolerance in vibrant communities

The time we've taken to build the NewsCloud platform has given us some time to gradually build our own community and take our time in coming up with rules. So, we often face challenges we haven't formally addressed or written software to address.

Yesterday, my Canadian friend SheMuses, an experienced technologist, newbie blogger and NewsCloud user, asked me if I could do something about an offensive comment posted on NewsCloud which appeared on a story in her journal.

The comment was posted in response to the story about GOP Rep. Virgil Goode's letter decrying the election of the Dem. Rep. Keith Ellison, a muslim:

Rep. Goode is on track recommending forbidding immigration of Muslims. The old saw they’re not all bad – but where is any outrcy from Musliums living in America .
about those barbarians who are killing Americans , parading in the streets shouting Death to America burning and defacing our flag . They are religious fanatics filled with hatred and we don’t need their kind here in America..
For Saslaw’s comments – just just another CYA – he doesn’t see the danger to America’s security.What’s his position on Mexican-order immigration? Those clowns on Capitol Hill with their 3-day work week don’t care about the nation – they’re simply protecting their seats of power. I have no respect for them with their earmarks that we taxpayers must fund.

While I find the material offensive as well (aside from the earmarks part), I felt that the poster was expressing their own opinion sincerely - and not ranting or intending to be abusive. I read the comment more in terms of ignorance and intolerance than outrageous behavior. To me, these are opportunities to foster more thoughtful discussions, a chance to strengthen understanding and community - whereas censorship might cut that process short. Therefore, I decided to remove the story from SheMuses' journal rather than to delete the comment. The story still appears on NewsCloud.

One thing that concerns me is whether leaving the comment up makes some people e.g. SheMuses or muslims, uncomfortable reading NewsCloud or being active participants of our evolving community. If I get more feedback that this is the case, I'd reconsider my decision. SheMuses expressed to me discomfort in responding directly with the commenter, which I can understand. She didn't want this material linked to her journal. Ultimately though, I'd like to establish more tools in NewsCloud to allow the community to police itself and develop its own values and code of conduct. The administrator should only step in as a last resort. Perhaps journal users should be able to filter how comments appear on their personal pages, like Friendster does with its comments.

Technorati Tags: code of honor, gpl, hate speech, keith ellison, newscloud, online community, social networks, terms of use, virgil goode

Only Days Left to Vote on Top Topics for 2007

If you haven't yet, be sure to vote on the topics you'd like to see covered in 2007. Voting ends at midnight on December 31, 2006.

Technorati Tags: 2007, hot topics, top stories, newscloud

Knight Foundation News Challenge Letters Due Shortly

Well folks, we're pretty psyched because we got our letter of inquiry for NewsCloud into the Knight Foundation today. If you're an aspiring citizen journalist or have a citizen media project, we hope you've already seen this. The deadline is December 31, 2006.

Good luck with your applications!

Knight Foundation News Challenge (might be down at the minute - this URL works)

Technorati Tags: knight foundation, NewsChallenge

Digg Struggling to Broaden Appeal

It's interesting to watch Digg struggle to broaden its appeal beyond technology readers. Today, the top posts are mostly technology and feature "YouParkLikeAnAssHole.com".

They have such a huge tech audience - it will be interesting to see what techniques they employ to reach out to others. Or, will they settle for being the juvenile social network for those tired of Slashdot.

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, digg

Post links to your new media projects here

As someone working without venture funding on an open source project, it can be hard to get the word out and attract people to your site. If you are working on a new media project that you'd like to tell people about, email me and I'll probably be willing to post a link to it here.

Projects should have some social benefit. They should not be funded by venture capital - those projects can buy their own marketing. Please email me the link and a 3 sentence description of what's cool about your work.

Note: I may post links in summary form rather than individual postings.

Good luck in your efforts.

Email projects to me here or post them as comments below.

Technorati Tags: new media, citizen journalism, marketing

NewsCloud Releases Open Media Web Services and API

Today we're announcing the release of the NewsCloud Web Service and APIs as part of our effort to make NewsCloud into a fully open platform for media distribution. Our goal is to expand the potential for citizen journalism by helping developers embrace and extend our work. The NewsCloud web services will allow other community developers to easily interact and expand the stories and features at NewsCloud.com. We hope the result will be a variety of cool mashups, customized Web sites with media content and a better NewsCloud.

NewsCloud's Web Services consist of more than 50 interfaces (APIs) for interacting with our Web site. Nearly everything you can do as a user on the NewsCloud site can be done via our APIs from your own Web site. If you want to, you can even create your own news site - or design your own front page.

We've tried to make it easy for Web developers to make use of our APIs with a simple PHP class. By using our NewsCloud PHP class with your code, interacting with data from our site becomes as easy as manipulating any PHP array data.

We've also built a number of examples for which we're sharing the source code: The Cloud Report - a custom front page, a mini-text-based version of NewsCloud for PDAs, a customized version of your journal page (clippings from all your news stories), a personal tag cloud, a custom group page featuring Daily Show content, example sign in and registration forms, a keyword-based image roll and more. These are just a start - but the potential is vast. We'll be improving and adding to the samples over time with help from our developer community. We've also integrated AJAX using the Prototype Javascript Framework into our registration and voting example to show developers an easy way to take advantage of the interactive elements we use on NewsCloud. We'll be building more AJAX examples over time.

All of our APIs are available via REST as described in our documentation, so you don't have to use PHP to get in on the fun. If there are developers who would like to build code libraries for other platforms or improved examples, please email us.

For users who just want to use our news headlines without the API, we've provided code examples of using the Magpie RSS parser to grab stories from any of our site RSS feeds.

The NewsCloud PHP class and example code can be downloaded here. Use of the NewsCloud PHP class requires PEAR be installed on your server, however, you could replace PEAR with another library for making HTTP requests at your preference.

How can you get started?

Getting started is easy:

1. Visit our NewsCloud Web Services Overview
2. Browse our documentation
3. Get your API key (registration required)
4. Download our example code and start customizing!

How can I get more involved?
We'd appreciate your help with NewsCloud. First, we encourage you to get involved in the NewsCloud community by posting stories and joining discussions. Learn more.

Then, when you've had time to work with our example code, please share your improvements with us. If you have requests for us to expand our API capabilities, please let us know. You can either join the discussions and post suggestions in our experimental Google Group Web Services community - or just email us.

You can also contribute funds to support our site development - click on the tip jar to the upper left if you'd like to help.

Disclaimers

NewsCloud is small startup with just one full time person, so we're monitoring our API usage tightly and carefully limiting volume on sensitive APIs to prevent abuse. Once you've tried out our Web services, just let us know if you want us to increase your limits for your application. If you have a valid use, we'll do our best to accomodate you. Email us here.

We may also modify the API without notice. However, if you use our PHP class as an abstraction layer, you're less likely to run into compatibility problems. We will post notifications of changes and enhancements to the API and example code here on the blog. You can subscribe to our blog feed here.

Right now, there is no cost to use our APIs but we reserve the right to revisit this issue to accomodate load and bandwidth issues, as well as the long term sustainability of our currently pro-bono organization.

About NewsCloud

NewsCloud was founded in 2005 by Jeff Reifman to create an open community to address the problems with consolidation of corporate media and censorship. Originally named CommonTimes, the site was renamed in 2006 as NewsCloud.com. NewsCloud evolved from CommonBits and CommonTunes - earlier experiments in online media distribution communities.

Jeff's experience with online media began in 1995 with MSN News and then MSNBC.com. Since leaving Microsoft, Jeff is a happy Mac user and has written extensively about his former employer. You can follow Jeff's blog at Idealog.us.

Technorati Tags: ajax, api, code samples, newscloud, newscloud api, web services

NewsCloud takes on the social news sites

NewsCloud.com is out of the gates - it's a rebranded and redesigned version of CommonTimes - in fact, all of the CommonMedia sites have now been rolled up into NewsCloud.com.

NewsCloud's goal is to be the best place to share and discuss news that matters with your community. So, far we're off to a good start. There are a few things interesting about our approach with NewsCloud:

NewsCloud boldly asks the questions whether one person can still build a one person Web start up? NewsCloud is not venture funded. Unlike the millions of dollars invested in some of our competitors, NewsCloud is primarily the work of one person, Jeff Reifman, with an occasionally rotating team of intern programmers and designers who've helped along the way. Sometimes, when I'm working hard on NewsCloud, I like to wonder if those guys ever stress about their burn rate. Check it out and tell us what you think - can one person still build a successful Internet start up?

For now, NewsCloud blocks Internet Explorer. We just think that IE is an old and pretty sucky browser. It doesn't have tabs, it's unusually vulnerable to a variety of Internet attacks and phishing and it's closed source i.e. inextensible. We want our users to have a better browser and a better experience, so we encourage people to download Firefox. Firefox supports tabs, is fast, stable, a number of great extensions and it's open source.

NewsCloud has a progressive emphasis to it. In this era of massive corporate lobbying and the obvious corruption of the Republican leadership party in two (and nearly three branches) of our government, the democratic media is more important than ever. NewsCloud encourages the promotion of stories which target corruption, deceit, hypocrisy and important issues of our day: the war in Iraq, Global Warming, the Federal Deficit, electoral reform, et al.

So, check out our new design. Sign up today. And invite your friends.

Please post your comments below or email them to us.

Technorati Tags: commonmedia, commontimes, newscloud, seattle, social bookmarking, social networks, web 2.0